All the entries on chromasia are placed into one of seven primary categories: six to reflect the aspect ratio of the image, and the seventh to indicate that an image isn’t available as a print. Additionally, each photograph may be assigned to one of more additional categories or subcategories, e.g. my travel category, children category, and so on.

about the ‘children [portraits]’ category

The 'portraits' category is a subcategory of my 'children' gallery and contains both posed and 'natural' portraits of our kids, their friends, and various other children.

Libby and I took the kids over to Preston yesterday afternoon, to visit our good friend Neil Simpson and his wonderful family. While we were there I took quite a few shots of the kids in the park, but I think my favourite from the trip is this one: a shot of Rhowan taken in Neil's back garden.

I still have a few shots from Dubai and Oman to post but thought I'd put this one up first. It's an old image, shot in 2009, and features Tabby, our youngest but one daughter. It was taken when we were still living in Bulgaria, just after she discovered the ash pile from our wood stove. This wasn't the last time she decided to play in it, but it was one of the better photographs of the resulting mess. I have no idea why I haven't posted it before - there must have been something I didn't like about it - but I couldn't come up with any good reason not to post it now.

It's difficult to describe the experience of being and living in Bulgaria, but this shot captures some of its flavour: taken during a recent trip to a local waterfall for a barbecue. Libby's in the foreground, and our good friends Andy, Petsi and their young son Mario are in the background (along with Finley, our eight year old).

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Finley (our nine year old son) was in a terrible mood when this was taken, but in reality he was just a bit miffed that I asked him to look up. Clearly, playing on the iPod is a lot more important than having your portrait taken ;)

I thought that I was done with the sugar skull portraits of Rhowan but thought I'd try something slightly different with this one, i.e. combining two separate RAW conversions: one for most of the image, the other for her eyes. The first has a clarity setting of -48, which is why this one is a lot softer than the other two I posted, while the second had the clarity set to around +20.

This started out as an alternative to the shot I posted yesterday, and I had intended it would be in colour. The more I played with it though the less I liked it, so it ended up in black and white too.

I posted some shots of Rhowan back in November when she first tried sugar skull makeup (here, here and here) but we thought we'd try it again today: a) because I think it makes for a good portrait, and b) because I wanted to shoot some more images using the 56mm lens on the XT-1. We shot a whole bunch of stuff and ended up with two that we both like: this one, and a colour version that I'll post tomorrow. We both prefer tomorrow's shot.

Here's the second shot taken with my new Kipon M42 Tilt and Shift adapter along with an Asahi Pentax Super Takumar 50mm f/1.4. Like yesterday's it's largely experimental, but I think it has a bit more creative merit than the last one.

Here's the first of what I hope will be many shots taken with my new Kipon M42 Tilt and Shift adapter along with a Asahi Pentax Super Takumar 50mm f/1.4 that I picked up on eBay recently.

If you're not familiar with tilt shift lenses take a look at this link. It explains the basics of camera movements and how these affect the appearance of your images.

For those of you who are more familiar: this shot was taken with 8 degrees of horizontal tilt at an aperture of f/4. Having taken a closer look at it - i.e. on a decent screen rather than the back of the camera - I think I probably overdid it a touch: there's just too much blur on the right, and the outer edges of both of Rhowan's arms are a bit soft. Next time, if I'm shooting a similar shot, I think I'll try somewhere around 5 degrees instead.

This is the third and final shot from our Halloween shoot yesterday afternoon, and as you'll see if you take a look at the original it's the most heavily processed of the three. I think it's probably also my favourite, but I'm pretty pleased with how all of them turned out.